By Ellaha Rasa
Shamail lies in a hospital bed. Her body is covered in injuries. She is not able to speak for the cuts to her face, but her mother, by her bedside, says one of Shamail’s legs is broken and her spine is compressed.
However, Shamail’s deepest pain is the death of her two daughters. They were aged six and nine years old. As her mother talks about them, Shamail sheds tears from her swollen eyes. Her right eye shows signs of a bruise forming, and her left eye is already a distinct purple hue. Her jaw has ten stitches. She opens her mouth and shows me her bloodied teeth.
Shamail, 30, was at home with her daughters when her home in the Naib Rafi area of Herat province’s Zindajan district was rocked by a magnitude 6.3 earthquake on Saturday at only 14 km depth. Her mother explains that once Shamail was pulled from the rubble, it would be another 13 hours before Shamail’s jaw would be operated on at Herat’s regional hospital.
“We arrived at the hospital at seven o’clock yesterday evening,” Shamail’s mother says. “There were so many patients the doctors could not take care of it, and the surgery was done this morning [Monday].”
photo: Rukhshana media.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA) says in its latest update that 11,585 people (1,655 families) have been impacted by the earthquake. It says 1,230 people were killed, 1,663 were injured, and 516 are still missing. OCHA says the number is expected to rise.
Some sources say that majority of the casualties were women and children, but exact figures are not available.
Survivors of the earthquake in Zindajan district say that as soon as the violent earthquake occurred, all the houses collapsed, and the residents of the area had no way to escape.
Strict measures
The road leading to Herat Regional Hospital from Cinema Square to Ma’arif Square in the center of Herat city has been blocked by Taliban forces. They are in both military uniforms and civilian clothes, holding sticks and using rifle butts to hit at people attempting to enter the hospital in search of loved ones.
Patients in beds line the courtyard of the hospital. A makeshift camp set up outside the hospital building has run out of beds. Patients sit on the floor, waiting to be seen by someone in the medical services. Health workers prepare to treat patients but are concerned that they are running out of supplies. The oxygen is decreasing.
Volunteers and aid workers help the patients inside the makeshift camp, handing out water, food, and clothes. Teenage girls are moving among the patients, holding out children’s clothes while talking to people and distributing clothes to them according to the age of the children.
The earthquake has put extreme pressure on an already under-resourced health system.
The Taliban’s local administration announced on Sunday that the victims of the earthquake have been transferred to the hospital by the Taliban’s air and ground forces. But the sheer scale of the demand made this impossible. Many families have had to find their own loved ones under the rubble, and find ways to bring survivors for medical care.
One of them is a 40-year-old woman, Fatima*, whose family say she survived 20 hours under the rubble before they pulled her out.
The woman’s face is bloodied face and her head is bandaged. Both eyes are swollen with black circles around them.
photo: Rukhshana media.
Fatima says seven members of her family were killed, including her children, when their house collapsed. Only her 12-year-old son survived. Fatima says she also cannot see, but it is not clear if she has permanently lost her sight.
Mass burials are underway across the affected villages in Zindajan district, including Kashk village.
In a video shared to social media, a man in the village pours dirt on his head in grief saying 14 of his family members were still trapped under the rubble due to the destruction of their house and none of them were able to get out.
Tolerating pain to the next level
For some of the survivors, the pain of hearing their loved ones call for help from under the rubble but not being able to save them is acute.
“I will never forget the shock of the quake,” Samira* says at the hospital where she is waiting for an update on her four daughters.
Fresh tears fall down her face. Her baby son – 1.5 years old – was being held by his grandmother when the earthquake struck. Neither of the two survived.
Samira says she could hear her mother-in-law’s voice from under the rubble of their home in Zindajan’s Naib Rafi village, but she could not save her. According to her, the Taliban relief forces also arrived at the scene very late.
“I could hear my mother-in-law’s moaning under the rubble,” she says. “I tried to save her by digging the rubble, but there were several earthquakes. I ran away from the rubble during the earthquakes, and after the situation calmed down, I continued to dig.”
Samira’s husband is back in the village trying to help other families recover the bodies of their loved ones.
Health workers at the hospital inform Samira about one of her daughters, but they tell her that the other three girls have been transferred to one of the private hospitals located at Darb-e-Malek area.
“Since bringing my daughters to the hospital, I have seen only one of them who had internal bleeding all over her left arm and leg.”
photo: Rukhshana media.
While the epicentre of the earthquake was in Zindajan district, Herat city itself 35 km south-east was not immune from the disaster.
Newlywed Sakina, 21, lived in a mud house in Herat city’s 6th district. She has multiple fractures in her face and head, and a torn uterus, according to doctors. She says will undergo an operation on her right side in three weeks when she has more strength.
She and her husband married two weeks earlier and are in debt from the wedding. They owe more than 100,000 afghanis (US$1300). But medical bills have pushed them even further.
Although she is being treated at the Herat government hospital, Sakina has been charged 40,000 Afghanis for radiology examinations and medicines.
“Since the earthquake happened, not a single tribe has helped us with at least 100 afghanis. My brother-in-law has lent us the 40,000 afghanis, but he is no longer able to help us,” she says.
Sakina’s husband was injured with fractures in his head and nose when the house collapsed. He is also in need of surgery but as he is not critical, he has received less medical attention. He is resting in the makeshift camp outside, but he is in pain.
“After my brother’s [initial] head and nose treatment, we were told that more serious patients have come to the hospital. So no one’s worried about us, and my brother is struggling with a lot of pain in the tent inside the hospital,” his brother tells Rukhshana Media.
For Laila, 30, the earthquake was a deeply tragic day. Along with her father, she helped pull out the bodies of all four of her children from the rubble. Her new babies, one-month-old twins, and her two older daughters, aged 7 and 9.
She is currently staying in the camp for the families of the victims in the courtyard of Herat regional hospital, overwhelmed with grief. She says her house has been turned into ruins and she has no place to stay.
The series of earthquakes that followed the initial magnitude 6.3 quake ensured that many villages were flattened. Survivors are living in the open streets, plains, and deserts. For any whose homes are still standing, they do not enter them for fear of more aftershocks. A magnitude 4.9 earthquake struck on Monday at around 11:30am local time and once again shook other parts of Herat Province.
With winter drawing close, the nights are especially cold, making the situation more difficult for displaced families.
Hamed, 27, has moved his family of 11 people to a garden in Kababian area of Herat’s Anjil district.
He closely monitors news and updates, and says there is still the possibility of another earthquake, so he prefers to keep his family safe – albeit uncomfortable – in the open space.
